Data gaps in UK justice: our interim report
Today we’ve published an interim report as part of our project on mapping data gaps gaps in the justice system in England and Wales.
So far, we’ve reviewed over 165 reports published in the past five years by Select Committees, independent bodies and civil society organisations.
Again and again, we found the same themes cropping up.
Our findings
We define ‘data gaps’ as areas where stakeholders found that they couldn’t get high-quality quantitative data to answer questions they care about.
We found many such gaps, but three areas stood out:
Court operations: a lack of basic management data is collected on court operations, including information on the nature of the court backlog and the delivery of remote hearings. As a result, the Ministry of Justice and HM Courts and Tribunals Service are limited in their ability to forecast demand for court services, and evaluate the impact of remote hearings on justice outcomes. The magistrates’ courts are particularly problematic.
Performance data: failures to collect performance data limits justice authorities’ ability to evaluate both their own interventions and the interventions of external suppliers. This means that services are often not being held to account and it is hard to track the progress of interventions.
The needs of individuals, especially in vulnerable groups: by failing to collect data on certain groups within the justice system, the needs of individuals risk being overlooked. This report finds data gaps regarding the prison population with mental health and neurodiversity needs, the gender-specific health and social needs of women in prison, and the needs of children separated in young offender institutions.
We also found significant evidence of data gaps in sentencing data (we’ll write about this in future), and disaggregated data on protected characteristics. We’ve published all of our raw findings here, so you can see what we found.
Why this matters
Data gaps matter. Without access to high-quality, reliable information, we're left with an incomplete picture of our justice system.
As a result, vulnerable groups risk being overlooked by policymakers; it’s harder to scrutinise the performance of public authorities; and it’s harder to quantify and tackle pressing issues like potential biases and regional variations in access to justice.
We hope this project will shed light on the areas where that scrutiny is needed most.
Next stages
This report serves as the foundation for a broader project on data gaps, particularly in the justice system, that we are pursuing over the next few months.
We expect that the next stages will include the following:
More stakeholders: repeating this research with sources representing a wider range of stakeholders, including academic papers, Parliamentary written questions, media reports and more.
Auditing government’s response: where stakeholders have made recommendations that data gaps should be closed, we will track how the Government has responded.
Identifying the causes of gaps: through desk-based research and interviews with stakeholders and statistics producers, we hope to understand the underlying causes of pressing data gaps.
Recommendations: based on all the above, we intend to set out actionable recommendations for areas where the MoJ and HMCTS should act to reduce data gaps.
Throughout this project, we’ll be sharing our research publicly. We’ll also be engaging with stakeholders with the hope of sharing our findings and methodology widely, so that others can build on them.
You can read the full report here (PDF), which describes our methodology and its limitations, and links to all our referenced research.
Of course, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re interested in justice data gaps or have any thoughts about our research, please do get in touch.
Our work on justice data is funded by the Legal Education Foundation, as part of their ongoing programme of research and advocacy to improve the quality and availability of justice system data. We are grateful for their support.